Trish's Blog

There are so many places to go with this movie and the various theories, etc, that we’ve been studying and discussing with class.  Informally, I enjoyed the movie.  I thought it was intelligent and thought-provoking, and it is one of the few I believe I would also have enjoyed as a naive viewer as well.  Without having attended English 5380 and without having read Baudrillard’s work “Simulacra and Simulations: The Precession of Simulacra”, I think what I would have most noticed was the creepy voyeurism of the whole thing.  It’s reality television gone to a terrifying level.  Some might argue that it is more real than our so-called reality television because Truman’s life is lived without the knowledge of the cameras all around him – therefore, the viewer is supposed to assume that everything he does is absolutely genuine, even if nothing else in his entire world is.

Though, as I mentioned before, much could be said about this movie in terms of our various studies, I want to focus primarily on the concept of the real and of what Baudrillard refers to as the hyperreal.  As JB states: “It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real; that is to say of an operation deterring every real process via its operational double…” (1).  Undoubtedly, this is what has been done to Truman within his imaginary world.  By creating a world in which the only objective is to cover up the fact that it doesn’t ”really” exist, Truman’s parent corporation (another really, really disturbing idea) dissimulates the fact that there is nothing there if they are removed.  EVERYTHING dissumulates this fact other than Truman himself; even his relationships are simulated.  The undoing of it all occurs when he finds, despite all the efforts of the production crew, something that is not merely a planned representation of a facet of the outside world – the real process of falling in love with an extra rather than with his simulated wife.

I found the public reaction to be both predictable – who doesn’t love a cause? – and ironic.  They – supposedly living in the world of the real – are absorbed in Truman’s life and have been for almost thirty years.  Is their world really any more real than his?

I found an article today stating that Google is developing a way to allow repeat YouTube copyright offenders to erase “bad marks” on their account records from copyright infringements: something they are calling copyright school.

Here’s the Link

If someone views a certain video and, I believe, takes a quiz, he or she can put their account back into good standing.   I’m a little suspicious about whether or not this will actually do any “good” (by the definition of the injured recording and motion picture industry), but it does serve to bring the issue of copyright and YouTube into even sharper relief than it was before.  I wonder if this policy will ameliorate any of the sudden take-downs that users currently experience on YouTube?

I have been dreading this particular assignment all week.  It seemed to me to be a rather onerous task to analyze an episode of a TV show that I’ve never watched.  I had heard of Battlestar Galactica before, of course, but this one doesn’t even fall under the things I might have watched if I spent much time watching television.  I was mistaken – and as my informal assessment of the episode, I’ll simply say one thing:  I’m sorely tempted to start from the beginning and watch the whole series through.  Maybe someday I will.

Because I was so leery of trying to understand something about which I had so little knowledge, I did a little background work.  I visited the Wikipedia page Dr. G pointed us to in her email, and proceeded from there to the Battlestar Wiki’s discussion of the episode.  It was immensely helpful to know what I was looking for before I looked for it, and after a discussion of the show’s premise with a sf-junky friend, I felt ready to go.

“Downloaded” was interesting on several levels.  Because I already knew what was going on in this particular episode, I began with the expectation of looking for the doubles-triples-infinitesimals of doppelgangers among the Cylon humanoids.  The idea of death and rebirth of the consciousness is an idea as old as time and one I have already given a great deal of thought to after reading Stephenie Meyer’s The Host (don’t judge).  What was different about this one, though, was that when Number Six and Number Eight were “rebirthed” following the death of their former bodies, they were each faced with carbon copies of themselves.

Number Eight’s (Sharon’s) response was, I believe, the most representative of the discovery of a doppelganger.  Her sheer revulsion and, I believe, terror at seeing a carbon copy of herself was telling because it not only forced her to finally (?) accept the fact that she was a Cylon.  It was telling because she saw, in “herself” (or a mirror image of herself) that which she had always considered the enemy.  This reminded me quite a lot of the rules of time travel as expressed in pretty much every text I’ve ever read that deals with the issue – you cannot risk being confronted with your “other self.”  Sharon’s reaction exemplified the reason, because how can a person be expected to hold onto sanity when they are confronted with everything that is evil in their own person?

I enjoyed the way this episode explored the issues of unity vs. individuality and the uniqueness of the “soul” (or insert your own word for it) over the body.  All of that says little, however, of the episode’s significance in the light of McCutcheon’s article, “Downloading Doppelgangers”.  His assertions that the casting of Canadians in the antagonistic Cylon roles was telling of the United States’ relationship with Canada on several levels were interesting to say the least, as were his assertions regarding the filming locations.  I had never really thought about that aspect of it before; once, way back when, I was an avid X-Files viewer and was aware of the fact that it had been filmed mostly in Vancouver.  I never gave it much thought, though.  Where the film was made didn’t seem to me to be overly important.  I stand corrected on that point.  I would like to do some more reading on this particular theoretical issue, though.

All-in-all, this was a very interesting pairing of article and media.

This film was entertaining!  I found it so both because I enjoyed the style of the thing and because, prior to watching it, I read through the information on its official website.  It was nice to know going into it what the creator’s intentions were as well as what works it drew from, not to mention some of the fun information about how it was made. The creator’s main purpose seemed to be to express her feelings about the dissolution of a long-standing relationship, and I found it interesting how she appropriated a very old story in order to gain this end.

Just for grins, I did a little YouTube surfing after I watched this video, curious as to how others have expressed their feelings about relationship endings.  Though I know that in the case of Sita Sings the Blues, the creator already had the background of animation and authorship, what I found on YouTube was similar in its appropriation of cultural expression, not much was exceedingly creative.  Perhaps I do those creators an injustice, though.  At any rate, this blog is about Sita, not about the others, so I will get back to my main point.

One of the things I found most amusing was the interspersed scenes of the shadow audience discussing the story of Sita and Rama.  On the website, Nina Paley state that these encounters were unscripted.  I liked that, mainly because it gave an air of authenticity to the discussions – and, though they were discussing an ancient story, it had the ring of a water cooler discussion of some relationship gossip.  This, I thought, lent well to her purpose of airing her feelings over her relationship.  It was also very funny, and as a viewer I appreciated that even more than the ring of authenticity.

Paley made it very, very clear by differences in the drawings and animations themselves which particular aspect of culture she consciously appropriated at any given point in the film.  The music videos, which I also found hilariously funny, were not done by the same Sita, Rama, and other characters as the scenes which depicted the ancient tale.  I liked that, especially because the round-hipped, round-eyed, gaping-mouthed Sita was my favorite of the three.  Though I’m not familiar with her choices of songs, I thought what she did fit very well into the overall clash of comedy and tragedy in the film.

The self-referential scenes of Nina and Dave were intriguing. These scenes were, first of all, the least detailed of the four different styles.  More than that, however, I endured the undulating feeling of them (for the animation caused even surfaces which should have been stable to shiver and shake) because I felt as though Paley was, perhaps, making a statement about the unstable nature of human relationships in general.  Possibly, also, she found a way to express her personal pain in the breaking of something she had obviously considered to be solid.  Because none of the other background images moved in the same way as these scenes moved, I know she meant something by it.  I can only guess at what it was.

There is much more to say about this work; I haven’t touched its publication with a Creative Commons license, which is very interesting in and of itself, nor have I really touched upon the interplay between biographical experience, appropriation, and the creator’s intentional message.  I am rather hoping these come up in class.

Here is a link to the Flickr photoset of the Russel and Purrington whaling panorama that influenced the writing of Moby-Dick:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nbwm/sets/72157623043914197/

The panorama is currently housed at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, MA.

Before I get into any kind of analysis of the film, I think I’ll do my traditional personal opinion of the film first.  It can be summarized in one word: ew.  I found the gore to be off-putting, the badly-pronounced English to be distracting, and the exaggeration of the elements of the spaghetti western to be kind of…well, kind of silly.  This was my least-favorite film of the ones we have been required to watch so far.

Having said that, however, there were some elements of the film for which I can have some respect, and the first was the director’s use of color in the sets and costumes.  From the Prologue, in which I noticed a pronounced difference in the color of the backdrop with the muted color of the traditional western set in front of it, and throughout the film, I felt that color really helped to represent the merging of eastern and western culture in the film.  In addition to this representation, the costuming and the use of color throughout – up to and including the fighters’ hair – was really genius.  It was done in a way that the colors not only identified people as Heike or Ganji, but that it spoke of the underlying motivations of both the characters and of the gangs.  Though white is traditionally used to represent purity or virginity, I felt as though the use of white was to provide a canvas on which the red could be shown more clearly and with greater contrast.  White in this movie was self-assured and calmly confident, but there was just more to the many shades of the color red.

I did a little bit of research on this film in order to see if I could educate myself on some of its background, and I was surprised to find out just how much intertextual play there is.  I knew going in, of course, that it was related to the spaghetti westerns of the 1960’s.  I easily recognized the Shakespearean references as well as the prediction of the end when “Henry” referred to the War of the Roses.  I recognized a reference (though I might be cracked in this case) to Kali in the eight-armed, violent figure of Bloody Benten.  What I did not see, though, were the references to Akira Kurasawa, another Japanese filmmaker and apparently someone I should have been aware of before watching the movie.

All-in-all, I can see why this movie would be chosen for our class, and I think it will make for some interesting discussion.  I still can’t say that I liked it, though.

I watched Being John Malkovich under very unusual circumstances.  My daughter, who is three years old, woke up around one in the morning on Monday with a fever and a bad cough, so I decided as I medicated her and tucked her into the couch next to me that I would go ahead and watch the movie since I was going to be awake anyway.  I watched it a few years ago and, like Fight Club, wasn’t much interested in it upon first viewing.  Like Fight Club, though, I found that watching it as a “smart viewer” was a much more interesting experience.

My first thought as the movie opened was “Aha! Uncanny!”  Though the wooden puppets were not exactly mistakable for human beings, something about the way they were manipulated was a little unsettling.  It set the scene for the rest of the movie very nicely.  The puppetmaster, Craig Schwartz, already seemed to me to be a kind of evil guy from the beginning, and certainly his obsessive devotion to his craft was a little creepy.  The real fun, of course, did not begin until a little later in the film.

The choice of John Malkovich for the title character of this film was interesting, to say the least.  One of my neighbors claims that her cousin (I think) grew up as a neighbor and schoolmate to JM.  Obviously, this is a small association and a not-quite-grand claim to fame, but my neighbor told me that he was eccentric and strange even as a child.  I’m certain that his eccentricity was the reason why he was chosen to be the title character.  Having said that, however, in this movie he seemed quite bland and almost as though he was a blank slate on which the desires of the other actors and actresses were projected.  He was very bland, had very little of interest to say, and the shots of his life as it was seen before the characters learned to control him were colorless.  He only became interesting to me after he started being manipulated.  Perhaps this makes me a naive viewer; the only other bit of his work I’ve seen has been Shadow of the Vampire, and other than the few comments my neighbor made, I knew little about him.

Though I could go on about a lot of aspects of the movie (birth canal, anyone?  eyes?  dual personality? dopplegangers?), what interested me the most was JM’s statement when he figured out what they were doing: “It’s my HEAD!”  That statement seemed very expressive to me of the human condition in general in the current state of things.  We all want to believe so badly that our minds remain ours alone, that our actions and thoughts have agency, and that, when it comes down to it, we’re all our own people and in control of our own lives, at least to an extent.  We all want to say “It’s my HEAD!”  The truth of the matter, however, may be closer to what’s happening to JM in the movie: really, how much do we even own our own thoughts?

Vertigo was my first viewing of an Alfred Hitchcock film.  Somehow, that seems incredible even to me, though I never really thought about it before.  I expected it to be in black and white, for one thing, and I was surprised to find that it was in color.  For another, I was surprised at the length of it.  I knew it was a full-length film, of course, but two hours plus is long even by today’s standards.  (Mental note to self: check the length of a film before starting it at 11:30 p.m.)

All of that being said, I truly found Vertigo to be a work of art, and it made me want to watch more of Hitchcock’s work.  As I watched the complicated plot unfold, I was torn between working my mind to try to figure out exactly what was happening and drinking in the visual kool-aid of the film itself.   I have never been to San Fransisco, but I can say that Hitchcock’s shots and the particular way he moved the camera as the characters moved through the space was intruiging.  Though there were times that the film moved rather slowly (especially by modern standards) due to the calculated camera work, I was surprised that I did not become bored.  In particular, I enjoyed the driving scenes, and I will freely admit that those were rather too long.  I enjoyed the way that the camera was situated to focus both on Scottie’s face as he followed “Madeleine” and on the passing scenery as they moved through the city.

Speaking of faces, the focus on people’s eyes and expressions were part of what made this movie enjoyable to me.  (The only things I can say that definitely distracted me from studying the expressions of the actors were the weird eyebrows drawn onto Madeleine/Judy and the horrid red glasses worn by Midge.)  Though I know little about such matters, I feel as though the casting of the film must have been done very carefully, by people who could portray all manner of emotions with their faces and particularly their eyes.  From the flickering, almost-pedophiliac lovelorn expression worn by Scottie at almost all times he was in the presence of “Madeleine” to the wide-open groundedness of Midge as she tried unsuccessfully to be both devious and sexual, the actors did a very good job of translating feeling onto screen.

As for doppelgangers…there seemed to be so many in this film that it was hard to keep track of who was really the other side of whom.  The most obvious of these, however, is the ghost-Madeleine with Carlotta paired with Judy and the ghost-Madeleine.  I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a three-part doppelganger before, but it was obvious as soon as Scottie met Judy in the ending part of the film that she and the other two were meant to be counterparts to one another, even before it was discovered that she actually was playing the part of the ghost-Madeleine.  I’m looking forward to the discussion on this point in class tonight.  More interesting, though, was the connection between Scottie and Elster – the vile man out to murder his wife as the counterpart to the supposedly good man out of save the damsels in distress.   The way both of them use and regard women is contemptible, but Scottie is clearly the everyman, even considering his acrophobia, whereas Elster is the one who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.

Overall, I enjoyed this film very much and look forward to seeing some more Hitchcock films as I have the time.

As a follow-up to my presentation on fanfiction in class on Thursday, I’d like to offer a few links.

My Prezi
If you want to see the presentation again (though Ican’t imagine why you would), click that.

WizardTales
This is the website that I own and run.  It contains fanfiction from several fandoms, though it sticks more-or-less within the genre of fantasy fiction.   You might notice that it seems like it’s been a little bit dead…that’s because it was closed for two years and promotion is still underway to make it go again.  The subsequent fic links go to WizardTales, partly because it’s my blog post and I can do that, but partly because the coding on WT allows for fairly easy reading.

• Melindaleo – The Seventh Horcrux (general series)
  This is the fanfiction I referred to at the end of the presentation – the one that was published online as a “leak” of the seventh HP book.  It’s a predictive general series fic of approximately the same length as the novel itself.  It was the third, final, and (in my opinion) best of Melinda’s novel-length fics.  Though she herself would never go this far, many ardent fanficcers believe it to be preferable to the “actual” end of the series as written by Rowling.
• Opifex – From White to Black (prequel or saga)
  This is one of the few novel-length Inheritance fanfictions out there, and I have absolutely no problem with applying the word “incredible” to it.  It can be argued that this is a prequel to the events of Eragon, as it deals with the origins of the evil king Galbatorix, or it can be argued that it is one piece of a saga.
• Strider – “The Talk, Part One” (general series, one-shot)
  This is a very good example of a “missing moment” from Breaking Dawn.  It’s a short story, around 5K words in length, and so well-written that one reviewer commented that it was to be preferred over Twilight itself.  (As a side note, I always find those sorts of comments to be interesting especially for those who consider fanfiction in the light of an apprenticeship model of writing.)
• Nieriel Raina – “Morndel” (Retake)
  Another one-shot, this is an “after the end” or “post-canon” or “fourth age” story (depending upon who you ask) centered around Gimli from LOTR.

Links to the other sites listed in my presentation:

• Fanfiction.Net (fanfiction mecca)
  If you do any exploration of this truly admirable site, please keep in mind that it is unmoderated.  Nicely put, it means that it is an open platform for anyone who wishes to publish and receive criticism for their work.  More truthfully put, it means you’ll find a lot of crap before you find the good stuff.
• Twilighted
  Team Edward and Team Jacob are still buzzwords here.
• HarryPotterFanFiction.Com
  They claim to be the oldest HP fanfiction site out there.  I’m not sure whether or not this is true, but it is certainly true that they are one of the largest.  Due to their fairly high moderation standards, you can find some pretty good fics here if you poke around.
• LOTRFanfiction.com
  This one is also fairly heavily moderated, but there’s a lot of elf-lovin’ going on in many of the fics.  Just sayin’.
• Anime-Fanfiction.com
  I’m not an anime fan.  I really don’t know if this site is any good or if it isn’t.  If you like anime and choose to check it out, let me know what you think!

Other examples of remixing and appropriation in the various fandoms:

• WRock (Harry and the Potters)
  Short for Wizard Rock, this is fan music based upon the Harry Potter series.  The link I’ve supplied is to a YouTube video of Harry and the Potters performing “Voldemort Can’t Stop the Rock” to a crowd of fans who seem to know every word. This is one of the better-known wrock bands and was quite popular during the peak of the HP mania.  (Musicphiles, don’t expect much.  Just remember – it’s kids having a good time with the novelty of songs written about their favorite characters.)
• FanArt
  This is a link to WT’s fanart gallery.  A lot of what you might find are photoshop “blends” and Poser creations, but there’s also some pretty amazing work by some pretty amazing artists.

I would like to start this blog off by saying that I am quite glad I read Doris Gassert’s essay “You met me at a very strange time in my life.’ Fight Club and the Moving Image on the Verge of ‘Going Digital’” before I watched the film.  I had seen Fight Club once before, soon after its release, but I didn’t remember much about it except that it didn’t appeal to me very much.  Of course, the title of it probably had something to do with that.  Isn’t it funny how fixed we get on titles?  Anyway, I digress.

This time around, Fight Club was interesting.  It is, I believe, one of those movies that you can’t properly watch without some prior knowledge of what to look for. In other words, to borrow from Eco, I do not believe that I could ever have enjoyed Fight Club as a “naive reader” but I did find it to be more complex and meaningful after I had added to my “intertextual encyclopedia.” 

The character of Tyler Durden was intruiging to me.  As a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, I studied several forms of dissociation in my undergraduate course.  Having already watched the movie once and having read Gassert’s essay, I enjoyed watching for the one-frame shots of Tyler before the nameless narrator “meets” him.  These produced the effect of making it obvious that Tyler Durden was simply a construct of the narrator’s unstable mind, but as obvious as it seemed this time around, I remember not noticing it the first time I watched the film. 

I do have to say, however, that even with all that extra understanding and preparation, I found the film to be rather shallow even if it was interesting.  The idea that the only way we can restore masculinity (and therefore sanity, of course) in this film is by a very Marxist violent revolution.  I don’t necessarily object to the idea that violent revolution may be necessary in order for the world to return to sanity, but I do object to the idea in this film that the emasculation of the white male is symbolic of the woes of the country as a whole or that using pain as a vehicle to restore sensation and sensibility to the aforementioned white male was the only way to make anyone human again.

The departure at the end of the novel from Palanuik’s original ending in which the narrator winds up in a mental institution was a bit of a relief, to be honest.  At least in the narrator’s ability to finally reject his nihilistic doppelganger, there was a hint that Durden’s solution to end the march of the consumerist drone was not fully sane, nor was it fully advisable.